Happy Valentines Day everyone. I hope today's been a good day for you. We've got another first for this blog as we look at our first anime based off of a video game. We're about to enter into a fictional universe where Earth's civilizations are made up of a number of different races, primarily humans and elves, and enemies are legion. All was quiet in Cress's village until one day, it was destroyed sending him on a journey through time to protect what remains of the world from destruction. Thank goodness it's a short one. So gather your summoning rings and strap on your best boss-killing sword. Today, we're taking a look at
Tales of Phantasia, The Animation.
 |
The main cast, from left to right, Claus, Arche, Cress, Mint, and Chester.
Also from left to right, if we use D&D terminology, we'd have:
the druid(summoner), the wizard, the fighter, the cleric, and the ranger.
Amazing how these party archetypes are so reusable. |
Most anime inspired by video games don't necessarily have the best record so it's fair to say I went into this one with limited expectations. On the bright side, I have seen far worse. As I said, this series was an OVA that was was produced based off of a Namco produced game called
Tales of Phantasia, which has seen a number of releases on about 4 different gaming platforms between 1995 and today, with later iterations even incorporating full voice acting and other upgrades. The OVA was produced in four thirty-minute episodes by Actas Inc., Frontier Works Inc., and Geneon Entertainment over an extended period between 2004 and 2006. Though it roughly follows the plot of the original game, as best I've been able to research it, with a few key differences.
 |
This really inspires confidence.
The big bad villain isn't even here yet
and our heroes are already in trouble! |
The story begins... well, in the middle of something big. A small town has just been razed and we are introduced to our main heroes, a swordsman named Cress (alternately known as Cless in the fanlations that filtered over here after the first release of the game) and Mint, a female cleric, as they are... wait a second... naw... the show hasn't even started and they've been captured? I can tell this is getting off to a great start. So anyway, the guy whose in charge (and who actually had a name but it wasn't important enough to bear much remembrance in the context of this review) has dragged these two off with his cronies and after snatching a pair of amulets that the two are wearing, he starts to use the two stones contained within them to open the sarcophagus of our main villain, King Dhaos, who really, really hates humans for some reason. (Makes one wonder why the guy would even do that, but it was probably just for the chaos factor.) Meanwhile, this archer named Chester barges in and creates a commotion to kill off all of Mr. Chaos Monger's cronies, and rescue them and an old guy named Morrison who was apparently also taken hostage by the marauders. Dhaos is awakened, but in a split-second decision, Morrison decides to send Mint and Cress back in time to find the heroes who had reportedly sealed Dhaos before and enlist their help. In the meantime, he and Chester plan to hold Dhaos off (assuming they can find a means to travel back in time. Once they have that, holding him off shouldn't be a problem because they'll just show up in a second in relation to those left behind, right?) So Cress and Mint land a hundred years in the past, and then we have a huge flash forward as apparently an entire war is fought off screen. We are then promptly thrust into the war's last battle at a place called Midgard (yes, like the name of our plane of existence in Norse mythology) and we are introduced to the other half of the main team, the summoner, Claus F. Lester, and his companion Arche Klein, the half-elf witch (I think that's what she is. She does ride a broomstick.) As the battle ends, they determine to find a way back to Cress and Mint's time in order to save the future and eventually, destroy King Dhaos.
 |
Cress: That's a big honkin' tree there.
Any idea why it needs you and not any other cleric, Mint?
Mint: Nope. |
The world the characters live in feels like it should be a pretty big one. It has a name, Aseria, though I had trouble remembering it because names don't mean anything unless you understand what someone is talking about. There seem to be many varying societies and cultures which are hinted at. Like there seems to be an elven culture and there seems to be ninjas and there seems to be some stratified society for the humans which half elves try to fit into since elves seem to hate them. But none of it gets expanded on. All we get is the gild of a fantasy world that feels like it should have a lot in it, but no one really wanted to tell more about it because, hey, we're in a hurry to slay a bad guy. Yeah we know that Cress and Mint got their village burned to the ground, but I couldn't help but wonder if their people were the same as the ones in Midgard of 100 years earlier, or another people that moved in later. As for the elves, we learn virtually nothing about them. We also know nothing about how the magic works or how Claus's summonings work. There is a subplot about how Yggdrasil is in trouble and that's hampering magic use in the past somehow, but that's never really explained either. Action adventure stories are about seeing things and the journey is supposed to be part of the reward, but if most of the journey is not explained and you have no way of relating it to the story in terms of how geography and culture affect what's going on, it's like someone stole the center of the chocolate cake, something's missing.
 |
| Those half elves sure move fast don't they? |
There was a similar problem with the characters, and I don't just mean the supporting characters who in the game were very important and therefore I'm sure most people who have played are scandalized that I don't remember any of their names after watching this OVA. I mean the main characters too. Character development is just not there. The character designs are nice and all, and I got the feeling that some of them could be very interesting characters if they were just allowed to shine, but they don't. In fact, it really just feels like they were written to go through the motions. Granted, one of the root causes is lack of space (there's only so much one can cover in about two hours) but that's no excuse for some of the half-assed stuff that gets pulled. Like from the beginning, you have Cress and Mint as the two lead characters and it feels like they are probably going to get together, but nothing happens on that front. You don't even really get any dialog that might set them apart as unique characters. There's a point where Arche and Chester are supposedly "developing a relationship" just by spending a few moments snapping at each other in one scene, and then not five minutes later, they're cuddling just because Chester tries to cheer her up after the local elf population wouldn't allow her into a local village for being a half elf. Claus, apart from having his family name rhyme with Chester, is apparently the designated brainiac of the group, though considering he's from the past, should he really know so much? Hmm, maybe Cress and Mint are from the dark ages? There's also this ninja girl named Suzu who only got slipped in as an after thought near the end who I think might have been part of the party in the game but got dropped from the A-team in the animation for time reasons. She seemed like she had this big story about how her dad had gone all evil and was making the clan do awful things, but it just gets hand-waved. Guys, if your gonna bother putting it in, take the time to explain it, otherwise, viewers are just gonna get confused. We get exactly the same problem with the villains. The first bad guy that comes along really doesn't come across as anything more important than "Random Villain Seeking World Domination #543, and he only gets like a few minutes. The big bad guy is really confusing as King Dhaos is at first a threat, then he's somewhat helpful and then a threat again (I'll get into this below.) Yes he has a pretty interesting motivation once we learn it but it has a glaring inconsistency that needs addressing.
 |
Couldn't he have at least tried asking for help first,
before he decided that it was necessary to kill everyone? |
In terms of the plot as I said before, it is basically a super truncated version of the game. Once Dhaos is defeated in the past, the group determines that they need to go to the tree called Yggdrasil to heal it because of it's ability to grant magical powers because some half-elf guy at Midgard is researching this stuff called Mys-tek and it screwed magic up. This is where Dhaos confused me for a bit because he actually helps them heal the tree, but then promptly goes back to being their enemy and enemy to all that lives once they meet him after returning to the future. However, they don't beat him there. Instead, they scare him off and then someone from the future comes and requests THEIR aid, calling them the "Time Warriors", in defeating Dhaos in the future. this involves them going to the elves in the future to figure out how to forge this special sword for Cress and get this special summon for Claus that will supposedly destroy Dhaos before going to the final showdown. It turns out in the end (no I don't care about spoiling this one) that Dhaos was an alien who had come to Earth because only Yggdrasil's power could save his world. So yeah, nice job breaking it heroes, you've just doomed an entire race of people by killing it's savior! Don't you just feel great about that? Although in all fairness, if the tree was so powerful, couldn't he have just gotten a seed from it or something, you know, without killing everybody? I'm sure it wouldn't have been that big a deal. I mean, it can provide magic powers to the ENTIRE WORLD! One little seed should not be an issue! Most trees continue their species by producing a lot of them anyway. If he can travel freely through time, it should be even easier. He could even go to a point in history where the tree was at its height and procure one of its healthiest seeds then, or if it only produces one, then he could go forward in time to procure it when the tree died or when the humans no longer needed it, right? I dunno, maybe someone didn't think things through.
Presentation is probably the only place where I have anything good to say and even here, it's tempered with issues. I liked the character designs and the visual atmosphere which definitely has a very traditional monsters and magic type feel. Overall the music wasn't anything to write home about, but the opening and ending themes, "Yume no Hate" and "Priere" which both happen to be sung by Masami Suzuki (the seiyuu for Amelia in
Slayers) are both nice to listen to. However, one of the biggest problems is pacing. There is too much going on in too little space and it shows. Like I said earlier, whole wars got cut out or took place off screen because there just wasn't enough time (lazy excuse if you ask me, but what do I know?) Whole plots were truncated into single sentences like plot about Suzu's family which pretty much got whittled down to one sentence about not wanting to fight her father. Honestly, I think if the animators had even wanted to consider the possibility of being taken seriously, they would have given themselves more space, rather than creating for the viewers the rushed feel of being strapped to the front of a
shinkansen. Surprisingly, there is also an English dub, and this is yet another production in which Johnny Yong Bosch gets a pivotal role as he gets to be Cress. I don't know why they did one but if it's worth that much to you to watch this OVA in English, more power to ya. The dub work is not bad, but it's overshadowed by the fact that this wasn't S-ranked material to begin with. Overall, there's a lot about this anime that could stand to be better, in many cases a lot better, before I would even consider giving it a good recommendation. I won't say it's the worst anime I've ever seen. but it would have needed to do much better if it wanted to be more than just a mediocre retelling of a video game. I openly admit I know very little of the game itself, so who knows, maybe some of my issues are turned into outright genius when paired with the game as a set, but I really doubt it, and that's the tiger's two cents.
Images taken from Tales of Phantasia: The Animation
